Your fast track to Innovation Excellence

Project Management and Collaboration

Hitting planned product launch dates at the right level of product quality is a critical driver of new product profitability. Top innovators meet product launch dates 47% more often than their industry average, and 2.9 times as often as industry laggards.

An effective project management and collaboration process is crucial to being able to confidently predict product development durations and launch dates. Even more importantly, project management enables you not only to reduce launch date misses, but actually reduce the total planned duration for different types of development project. That means you will bring products to market faster, with the right level of quality, to gain market share, and stay ahead of your competitors.

IFT’s Solution

Powered by Planisware™, IFT’s solution delivers Project Management Institute (PMI) best-practices for project management. This software has the most powerful, web-based, enterprise project management, scheduling and collaboration capability available. Its also fully integrated with our stage-gate governance capability. Organizations such as Renault and Airbus use the software for detailed planning and tracking of highly complex projects with thousands of activities, in order to develop new products such as cars and aircraft. Yet the system can also be kept simple and easy-to-use, in order to manage quick development projects or projects with only a few activities per stage, by project leaders with little experience in project management techniques.

 

Rapidly create your initial project schedule by copying standard project templates and work breakdown structures for different types of development project. Templates can be as simple or complex as required

Adjust your project schedule using a powerful yet easy-to use web-based, graphical, schedule editor

Define activity and inter-project dependencies, activity durations, milestones and start and end dates constraints

Plan and manage iterative ‘agile’ development approaches to build and test the product

Support matrix-based project plans, assigning sub-projects to different R&D groups

Auto calculate project duration, cost, gate dates and product launch dates, and identify the project critical path

Use powerful estimation rules to identify specific activity durations based on product complexity.

Save multiple schedule baselines, to record approved project plans at each gate review

 

Perform what-if analysis on modifying activities, durations and dependencies, to find ways to accelerate launch dates

Maintain a risk register to identify, track and mitigate project risks

Identify the project team and assign activities to named individuals

Provide project team members with a graphical display of all work they have been assigned to, across multiple projects

Track activity and project progress and monitor key trend indicators such as schedule variance, cost variance, resource variance, project risk and earned value

Take corrective action on your project to overcome forecast launch date slippage, by adjusting the plan or applying more resources

Work offline on the schedule with a bi-directional interface with Microsoft Project

   
 Project Resource Usage details Project Cost
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Project Risks Project Health metrics 
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Example Solution Capabilities
Project Plan

 
 Project Resource Load
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Project Deliverables 
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Related NPD Processes